The following March Jason, Brenda, Paul (one of our key volunteers) and I hopped on a plane headed to South Africa, ready to glean from Martin’s training and to find out where this new collaboration and friendship would lead us. As we had hoped it led us to great new discoveries, both in farming and fishing.
I’ll spare the details of what Martin covered in his training program, but just know that his developments in Aquaponics are top notch. He had the exact solutions that we needed to bring our farms to optimal health and production. With an added “flood and drain media bed” to our existing vegetable beds the plants can get the constant source of oxygen and nutrients they need to thrive. Vegetable yields can be upwards of 10 times that of conventional farming in these aquaponics farming systems. After we attended Martin’s training school we went back and visited all the safe-homes and orphanages that we built farms for to add the new style grow beds that would give them the best yields. I’m happy to say that these farms are all doing even better than they were before because of the new developments. All this because we met a guy in a parking lot in Zimbabwe.